According to some sources, there will be more than 30 billion devices wirelessly connected to the “Internet of Things” by 2020. While much of the wireless communication will be between machines (M2M), increasingly solutions will be required to manage resources that are not just machines but also non-computing physical resources, including people, places and things. While a number of solutions have been developed to manage the growing number of disparate devices, common among these is that the platform owner maintains governance over the management of the devices to ensure their ownership over the usage and the associated business models. Open governance has not heretofore been an option for resource-owners/-users but once it becomes available for some resources, following historical models relating to privately held closed resources, those on closed networks will be forced to open governance if they wish to remain relevant with the broader domain of resource-owners and -users. Such owners and/or users will simply move to those resources that provide open governance.
Existing resource management platforms exert a fundamental level of control over resources on the internet of things. While some systems permit some level of access to resources or control, the ability to pass on ownership and/or governance over resources to other users without regard or authorization from the platform owner is limited. This is because the fundamental building blocks of resource management are centralized at the resource platform, rather than in the domain of the resource owner/user, or their delegate. As such, complete autonomy, notably including the ability to create virtualized resources related to physical resources and then distribute governance over such resources is necessarily limited. Certain functionality is necessarily located on and controlled by the platform. These fundamental building blocks include: accreditation, access, security, authentication, statefulness, availability, domain assurance, audit tracking, authorization, and administrative functions.
Currently, any network of “things” is closed and the barrier to entry is the governance of each closed network. Such closure is evident in the architecture of resource management platforms. Ultimately, the platform administrator, while they may distribute some level of access and control to resource owners (or rights holders), maintains control over governance functions; including the right to distribute to others the full governance functions.